An OSGi-based Application Framework for M2M Service Gateways
Until recently, machine-to-machine projects have been approached as embedded systems designed around custom hardware, custom software, and custom network connectivity. The challenge of developing such projects was given by the large customization and integration costs and the small re-usability across similar engagements. The results were often proprietary systems leveraging proprietary protocols.
The emergence of the service gateway model, which operates on the edge of an M2M deployment as an aggregator and controller, has opened up new possibilities. Cost effective service gateways are now capable of running modern software stacks opening the world of M2M to enterprise technologies and programming languages. Advanced software frameworks, which isolate the developer from the complexity of the hardware and the networking sub-systems, can now be offered to complement the service gateway hardware into an integrated hardware and software solution.
Kura aims at offering a Java/OSGi-based container for M2M applications running in service gateways. Kura provides or, when available, aggregates open source implementations for the most common services needed by M2M applications. Kura components are designed as configurable OSGi Declarative Service exposing service API and raising events. While several Kura components are in pure Java, others are invoked through JNI and have a dependency on the Linux operating system.
For more information, see the Eclipse project proposal.
Eclipse Kura requires at least Java 8 and OSGi R6. All bundles can make use of a Java 8 as execution environment. All bundles must be limited to the "compact2" profile of Java.
Development on Kura follows the gitflow model. Thus, the working copy is in the develop branch, and the master branch is used for releases.
The simplest way to start developing on Eclipse Kura is to use an Eclipse Installer based setup. To correctly setup the environment, proceed as follows:
- Start the Eclipse Installer
- Switch to advanced mode
- Select "Eclipse for Committers" and configure the "Product Version", then select a JRE 1.8+ and press the Next button
- Select the Eclipse Kura installer from the list. If this is not available, add a new installer from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eclipse/kura/develop/kura/setups/kura.setup, then check and press the Next button
- Select the "Developer Type":
- "User": if you want to develop applications or bundles running on Kura, select this option. It will install only the APIs and the examples.
- "Developer" : if you are a framework developer, select this option. It will download and configure the Eclipse Kura framework.
- Update Eclipse Kura Git repository username and customize further settings if you like (e.g. Root install folder, Installation folder name)
- Leave all Bootstrap Tasks selected and press the Finish button
- Accept all the licenses and wait for the installation to finish
At first startup Eclipse IDE will checkout the code, perform a full build and configure a few Working Sets. Now you are ready to develop on Eclipse Kura.
For further information, building and deployment instructions, please visit the getting started page.
To raise an issue, please report a bug on GitHub issues.
The Eclipse Installer based setup works for the main used platforms like Linux, Mac Os and Windows.
Currently, the emulator web ui is not properly working on Windows so, with your setup, you will be able to build and deploy you applications, but not be able to use the Eclipse IDE based Kura emulator.
The full build of Kura is only supported for Linux and Mac Os based systems.
Currently the maven build on Windows requires to disable the tests and will fail when it tries to create the installers for the target platforms.
The project's POM files contain a reference to the Maven Exists Plugin. This plugin allows to verify the existence of a Bundle in the remote repositories and fails the build process if that happens. This helps Kura developers to prevent possible errors when building Kura.
If you want to build Kura and an error due to the Maven Exists Plugin happens, please review your changes. If you still want to rebuild a released Kura (or an already released Bundle of Kura), please invoke the Kura build with the -Pskip-exists-plugin profile.